What did Jesus eat at the Last Supper?
The gospel accounts tell us that Jesus and his disciples ate bread and drank wine at the Last Supper. However, bread and wine probably weren’t the only things on the table.
The Last Supper may have been a Passover meal. Passover is when Jews remember their exodus from Egypt. The gospels of Mark, Luke, and Matthew place the meal during the Jewish Passover on the day of Unleavened Bread.* This is the first day of the seven-day Passover celebration. On this day, Jews traditionally traveled to the temple in Jerusalem to sacrifice a Passover lamb. Today, this day of Passover is celebrated in Judaism with the Seder supper.
The modern Seder tradition didn’t emerge until the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D., but Jews in Jesus’s time did share in a Passover meal after making their temple sacrifice. It wouldn’t have looked like a modern Seder, and the historical record of the Passover meal before the Seder tradition is less detailed. But we do know that the Passover meal would have included unleavened bread and likely a roast lamb. So if the Last Supper was a Passover meal, we can probably place those two foods on the table.
For a fuller menu, we have to do a bit of guesswork. But in 2016, two Italian archaeologists published a study on what was eaten at the Last Supper that included a reconstructed menu. The two archaeologists drew from Bible verses, Jewish texts, ancient Roman literature, and archaeological data to learn about what people ate in Jerusalem during the first century A.D.
Based on their research, they hypothesized that the menu for the Last Supper would have featured bean stew, lamb, bitter herbs, fish sauce, unleavened bread, dates, and aromatized wine.
Reconstructed Last Supper meal
Unleavened bread
Dates
Aromatic wine
This menu reflects both that Jesus and his disciples were practicing Jews who may have been celebrating Passover, and that Roman culture surrounding them had an impact on their diet. Fish sauce, for example, was a popular Roman ingredient. And it was likely served at Herod’s banquet and the wedding at Cana.
